For a while now i have been feeling quite unsettled. My moods have been really up and down. Some days waking up feeling mentally exhausted and flying off the handle at the most ridiculous things. Then other days i will wake up full of beans and ready and raring to go. However when I get there, I’m not always enjoying myself as much as I usually do. Some days a big fog of stress and overwhelmingness just surrounds me and weighs me down. It’s so stupid though because I don’t know what it is that I’m stressed about. So because there is no way out, I just have to stand strong while the storm betters me and then passes. It feels like when the computer JUST WON’T WORK and the only option left is to bash it and walk off. But you can’t walk off if you don’t know what you are walking away from, or where you are walking to. Over this year I have noticed these feelings getting stronger and stronger and more and more frequent. I went through a lot last year, i was in hospital three times and had quite major surgery. Now I’m all well and all fixed and all is good. So I thought maybe it is just time now for my mind to catch up with all of the events of last year.

i decided to mention this to my GP who has referred me to IAPT. (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies). They assessed me very thuroughly over the phone, over three phone calls and it looks like I have PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder). I did wonder, which is why i told them about a previous hospital visit I had six years ago which was very traumatic in a variety of ways. There is actually a name and a reason why I have been feeling so unsetled recently. That feels good in itself, it’s not just one of those weird things that you can’t explain, it has a name and it lives on Google. It’s a real thing. I wasn’t sure that they would see it. I thought that maybe I was just looking for things that weren’t there. Diagnosing myself via the internet like most of us do these days.

Today I have been speaking to a friend about it and picking parts of my life to pieces in a way, I didn’t realise how much trauma I had actually been through until we split everything up and talked about each thing individually. My life so far has been like a ridiculously over dramatic story. Like the writers are saying “Ooh we haven’t had a major drama yet in this chapter, what shall we do next?” I’m not saying all this in a bad way, I love my life and it’s definitely exciting. It’s just if you read it in a book you would probably think, oh here we go, another drama! To be honest I think that myself sometimes. So I was origionally thinking that it was just the one thing that caused my PTSD and then going into hospital last year triggered it and got it moving. But maybe it wasn’t just that one thing, maybe it was a mixture of stresses and dramas and experiences that have contributed to it.

IAPT phoned me back today and they have put my on the waiting list for CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy). I read online that they help you to understand and remove negative thoughts and behaviours. I think that will be really interesting. It could take a month to hear from them. So for now, I’m still a bit unsettled, but also very intreagued and looking forward to my therapy.

I hope to see you back here for My PTSD Journey – Part 2.

Xx ❤ xX